Porting games to virtual reality is 'the cardinal sin', says Sony

Wants a big portfolio of original content for launch

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This week Sony unveiled the latest evolution of Project Morpheus and announced it will ship the final consumer headset in the first half of 2016.

Right now, "quite a few" of Sony's internal studios are working on software for Morpheus, London Studio Director Dave Ranyard told TechRadar, while there's apparently "quite a lot of interest from third party companies".

But don't expect to see The Last Of Us upgraded for virtual reality any time soon. In fact, Sony seems keen to stay away entirely from the idea of giving old games a lick of VR.

"That's probably the cardinal sin of a lot of developers right now from a greater perspective - they'll take an existing game and effectively just try to put it into VR," London Studio Creative Director George Andreas told us.

"And you really do have to rethink the way things are done. Navigation in VR, for example - no one's really solved that particular quandary right now, from what I've seen externally anyway."

Old mechanics

Ranyard then went on to compare the birth of VR to the early days of smartphone gaming. "It's like when mobile games along and you got the virtual buttons. It was like 'We've got this great thing, lets put it in this new medium but well use the old mechanics.' And some of the IPs have changed to use mechanics that work for mobile, and they're better experiences."

"We're real advocates of start from the ground up. I think people can take an IP and do great stuff with it, but they perhaps need to rethink the baseline mechanics of how they're going to do stuff.

Ranyard did tell us that, unsurprisingly, Sony wants a substantial software lineup for the launch of Morpheus. "We want a nice portfolio. And judging by the interest, internally and externally, we'll get that." As for third parties, he wouldn't say exactly who Sony is talking to right now, but he did tease us a little.

"I was talking to the CTO of a major company only two hours ago and he was super excited, wanted to get me in to demo London Heist."